Content QA

What content QA is

Content QA is the last look at a page after it has been built and before the public sees it. Not the words: those were checked when they were written. This is the built thing. Every link clicked. Every image loaded and looked at. The headings read in order to see whether they still describe what is under them. The form filled in and submitted to confirm it goes somewhere. And the whole page opened on a phone, because that is where most of your readers will meet it.

It is not proofreading and it is not editing. If the text has not been read for spelling and sense, proofreading comes first and is a different job. If somebody needs to check claims, permissions and anything legally rash, that is pre-publication review. This is the mechanical check that catches the things nobody reading a document can see.

When you need one

You have somebody building pages who is good at it and working alone. Nobody looks at their work before it is public, so the first person to find the broken link is a customer, and they do not report it.

Or a page matters more than usual. A new service. A price change. A campaign page with money behind it. Anything with a form on it, because a form that silently fails to send is the single most expensive fault a small business website has, and it can run for months before anyone notices the inquiries stopped.

You do not need this as a separate purchase if I am building the pages, because it is already in the price of CMS content entry, page creation and blog publishing. Buy it on its own when somebody else does the building. And if the worry is dead links across a site that already exists rather than a page about to go out, that is link checking on a schedule.

What gets checked

• Links. Every one clicked, including the ones in the footer and the navigation on that page. Where it goes, whether it opens in the right place, and whether the link text says where it goes rather than saying here.
• Images. Each one loaded, right way up, not stretched, not the placeholder from the template, and carrying alt text. Also whether the picture is the one the paragraph beside it is talking about, which is a surprisingly common miss.
• Headings. One H1, the rest in order underneath, nothing skipped, and each one a description rather than a decoration. This is what a screen reader navigates by.
• Forms and buttons. Every form submitted with real text, the confirmation message read, and the resulting message confirmed as arriving in the inbox somebody actually opens. Every button pressed.
• Phone width. The page read at three hundred and ninety pixels wide, which is an ordinary phone. Tables that run off the side, images that crowd the text, buttons too close together to press, a menu that covers the first paragraph, text too small to read on a bus.
• The fields. Title, description, address slug, category and the preview shown when the page is shared, each confirmed as filled in rather than left to the system.

What you get

A fix list. One numbered list per page, each item naming what is wrong, where it is, and what it should be instead. Ordered so the first three items are the ones that cost you money if they ship.

Phone screenshots. Pictures of anything that only shows up at phone width, because describing a squashed table in words wastes an hour of somebody's afternoon.

The fixes, if you want them. Where I have editor access I fix what I find rather than write it down for you, and the list becomes a record of what was changed. Anything needing a developer is flagged instead of attempted.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A regional trade school is launching four new course pages before enrolment opens, built by a marketing coordinator who has done a good job on the words and the layout. The pages go to QA on the Tuesday, live the Friday.

Fourteen items come back across the four pages. Two links point at a staging address that will not exist publicly. Three images are the template placeholder. One page has its H1 repeated as a second H1 halfway down. The enrolment form on two pages sends to a staff address that was closed when the person left, which nobody had tested since March. At phone width the fee table runs off the edge on all four pages and the tuition figure is the part that disappears. Eleven items are fixed the same afternoon, the form routing takes a day and an email from the school, and the fee table is rebuilt as a list on phones by the coordinator once she knows it is broken. Enrolment opens with four pages that work.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What is going live, when, who built it, and whether I get access or only the addresses. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Per page, per batch, or a small monthly arrangement if you publish steadily, agreed before anything starts.
3. The inputs. A staging address or a private preview link, and an editor account if you want the fixes done rather than listed.
4. The check. One working day for up to five pages. Longer only if the pages carry forms that need somebody at your end to confirm the messages arrive.
5. The list. Sent with the screenshots, numbered and ordered by what it would cost you to publish it as it stands.
6. The re-check. After you or I have fixed things, one pass to confirm each item is closed. Included.

What it costs

Quoted in CAD after the half-hour call, fixed in writing, and priced per page or per batch. This is the cheapest thing in the whole of content operations, and it is the cheapest insurance you will buy anywhere on this site: a page costs a fraction of what it cost to write, and one broken enrolment form or one dead link on a paid campaign page is worth more than a year of checking. The pricing page shows the four published ways of working, and steady publishers usually fold this into the monthly one.

What happens next

If the same faults keep appearing, the answer is a written checklist and half a day of CMS training for whoever is building the pages, so the check stops being needed. If the faults are spread across years of old pages rather than new ones, a scheduled link check and a content maintenance plan deal with those properly. And if nobody is building the pages at all, CMS content entry includes this check in its price. This piece of work is complete on its own and nothing further is assumed.